A conversation between Derecho playwright Noelle Viñas, director Delicia Turner Sonnenberg and Director of Artistic Development Gabriel Greene

GG: Noelle, what was the inspiration for writing this play?

NV: I started it in college, right when I decided I wanted to be a playwright. The play’s origin is very much based on coming home after having left, knowing I’d be leaving again. I was taking myself seriously as a writer, so I started seriously observing the dynamics in the household I grew up in. All that self-perception had me curious about Latiné identity – specifically in the D.C. area, but also as a microcosm of the bigger dynamics in the country. It started as a dialogue between Mercedes and her sister; those two characters have always been part of the play. I wrote 12 pages as a college student and put them in a drawer – and by “drawer,” I mean my Google Drive. I literally forgot about them until 2018, when I was 60 pages into a brand-new play, and I went through my Google Drive and was like, “what is this?” And then I started writing this play instead. 

Part of the reason I got drawn to it in 2018 is because of the election of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but also because I was thinking about: what is the “Latino vote”? We keep talking about the way demographics work in this country. We try to cram two-and-a-half continents into one demographic box. We're not the same race. We don't even speak the same language. We have different dialects. So what does it mean to be represented in the arts, to be represented in government, to be represented to each other? I wanted to approach that from a deep, guttural family place, from where I was when I was 20 and asking, “what did I come from?”

GG: How foundational were those 12 pages? Were they just a jumping off point to where the story ultimately went?

NV: The characters were the same. Mercedes was definitely the cooler one, leaning back and being like, “why are you making such a big deal about these people coming over?” And Eugenia was living in this space of being uptight and worried about how she was perceived, which I think was really based on things I was observing between my mom and her sisters, and me and my sisters. The idea that Eugenia was running for office came way later, but it was political in the sense of how Eugenia was holding her identity with this white person that was coming over, and also these Latinos that were coming over at the same time. The politicking was already happening; I just didn’t have the root cause for why

GG: Derecho came to me in the summer of 2022 via Delicia, while we were discussing potential projects she’d like to direct here. Delicia, what made you respond so positively to the script?

DTS: I heard a reading of it over Zoom at the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, and from the very beginning, this play captured my imagination. I was drawn, both viscerally and dramatically, to the relationship between the sisters: the politics, the identity politics, the code switching, and what it means to be “othered” in America. How you have to wrestle with knowing your own self and standing in your own space. 

And also, I’m always drawn to strong female characters. On the surface, Eugenia is not necessarily a likable character, and I’m attracted to playwrights who are brave enough to write those women.

GG: After its inclusion in the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Derecho was part of our DNA Series in December, 2022, and we’ve continued developing it since then. In what ways has the play evolved over the last couple of years? Do you find yourself tempted to respond to the ways our political conversation is changing?

DTS: The current political situation hasn't changed much for me, personally. I'm in a place where I'm like, the burden of democracy has to stop being on the backs of people of color. For me, the idea of trying to find one’s self in the midst of chaos is what makes the story universal, no matter what political time we're living in – because for people of color, the glacier moves incrementally. My kids are having fights that my parents had.

NV: I think I've gotten a more nuanced perspective within the Latiné community. What are the ways that we are mimicking the structures of white supremacy within our own community? How can these relationships between sisters and between married couples be microcosms of those bigger repeating themes that we have in the U.S.? It's like a refrain, a chorus that nobody likes and we have to sing it every four years and with some regularity. That's the thing that we've talked about in our workshops. What is the musical pattern, literally and figuratively, that keeps coming back into the play? What are those rhythms that we keep hitting?

GG: One of the things that grabbed me from my first read of the script was the theatricality that comes from having two spaces in tension with each other: the realism of this expensive Alexandria home, and the more liminal, heightened space of the “barrio” – the one place these sisters can actually reach each other in ways they can’t or won’t in the “real” world.

NV: For me, sometimes speaking candidly and directly and clearly – the way I think the American theatre asks playwrights to speak – doesn't quite get to the truth of things for me. I feel like I have hidden the truth from myself because of various structures; I’ve gaslit myself. So sometimes poetic language – thinking outside of my body – is the only way I can speak directly. I think that’s true for these sisters, and I think that's true for a lot of women and people of color: there's just this thing that’s in your body and your subconscious and your dreams. You can find the words for it some of the time, and other times the only way to be direct about it is by being indirect. That’s the logic of how those barrio moments operate. 

GG: And that sounds like a great challenge for the amazing designers on this production.

DTS: Both Noelle and I were immediately attracted to our set designer, Tanya, because her take on it was architectural. Washington, D.C. is a place of power, and architecture is also a part of socioeconomic conversations, racial conversations, that kind of thing. We have this affluent Latinx couple living in a colonial house, and the obvious inherent conflict in that. As Eugenia tries to synthesize these two conflicting parts of herself, how do we represent that with the architecture of the house? For the barrio moments, that poetry we talked about, one of the things we're exploring is how the natural world starts to peek through this structure.

NV: One of the cool discoveries that Delicia and Tanya have made is this dichotomy between the stuff that Eugenia is trying to construct and control, and the way she – and all of us – get overcome when we try to make something clean and hermetically sealed in a way that isn't natural to us.

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